Share a Book. Share an Experience.

Each year since 2009, Pitt Public Health invites students, faculty, alumni, and friends to share the experience of reading and discussing our annual selection for the One Book, One Community (OBOC) program.
This year's OBOC selection is
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

About the Book

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Selecting this Year’s Book: From the Dean

Resources

Read-Along Program

Alumni, families, and friends are invited to sign up below and read along with the school's students and faculty by participating in the second read-along program. Read The Emperor of All Maladies and participate in live and virtual events and discussions. Read more...

HOUSTON MATTERS - Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses what happens when a machine begins to read its own instruction manual? I’m talking about humanity’s rapidly increasing understanding of its genome – the code that makes us who were are. We’ve mapped it and identified genes that lead to certain disorde... (05/12/2017)

Jennifer Silva, Expert on challenges of coal country to lecture at Pitt Public Health

PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW - On Tuesday, Jennifer Silva, an assistant professor of sociology at Bucknell University, will share her research tales at Pitt Public Health's “One Book, One Community” lecture. Among the questions Silva is trying to answer in her research: What happens when people feel le... (04/03/2017)

Siddhartha Mukherjee Wants People To Think Different About Cancer. Here’s How.

FAST COMPANY - Cancer is a difficult topic, but Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies, was such a compelling look at the history and future of the disease that it turned into a critical hit and unexpected best seller (as well as the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Gener... (03/18/2015)